Worth Mentioning - The Sky Will Fall

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Cody is impressed by one genre movie and let down by another.

KNOCK AT THE CABIN (2023)

M. Night Shyamalan’s directing career has been quite a roller coaster ride. He made a surprise blockbuster that blew people’s minds and was highly respected for a while, but then there was a backlash against him and the quality of his movies slumped. Then he made a comeback with movies like The Visit and Split... and while his comeback has had its own ups and downs, with his latest movie, Knock at the Cabin, he proves that he is still very capable of making a riveting thriller.

Shyamalan doesn’t always write the best dialogue and sometimes isn’t able to get great performances from the actors who try to deliver his dialogue, but there’s no sign of that weak spot in this movie. Everyone in the film’s small cast gives a strong performance, and there weren’t any notable clunkers in the dialogue. We also really get to know and care about the characters, which makes the movie even more intense because the story puts the characters through the wringer.

Knock at the Cabin is based on a novel by Paul Tremblay that was called The Cabin at the End of the World (which is a better title), but Shyamalan has said that he and co-writers Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman took the idea off in their own direction. The movie is “a different version” of the story Tremblay told in the book. That story begins with four mysterious people – played here by Dave Bautista, Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn – showing up at an isolated cabin in the woods where married couple Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) are vacationing with their young daughter Wen (Kristen Cui). These four strangers tell the family of three that they need to sacrifice one of their own to stop the end of the world. And they will have to kill their loved one, because suicide on their part won’t be enough to cancel the apocalypse. Every time the family refuses a request to murder one of their own for the greater good, the strangers will kill one of their own. And in doing so, will unleash a plague upon humanity. The family is told that if one of them isn’t sacrificed, the world will end with floods, sickness, and fire. But why should they believe a bunch of weapon-wielding weirdos who just showed up at their door?

That’s quite a foundation to build a story on and Shyamalan does a good job of making sure this 100 minute movie about seven people in a cabin remains captivating and challenging throughout. But how do you end a story like that? Do you tell the audience this was all just an awful act of cruelty? Are the strangers misguided, or hateful? Or are the visions they’ve seen accurate? Will the world end if the family doesn’t sacrifice one of their members? Should the family make the sacrifice?

I won’t say how it all wraps up. I will say that it’s a bummer... but there aren’t many options for the story to come out in a way that wouldn’t be a bummer. The ending Shyamalan went with is the one I think is absolutely perfect for the story, and was the best way to make Knock at the Cabin a satisfying viewing experience, even if it leaves you feeling a bit sad.

Shyamalan is hit and miss, but Knock at the Cabin is one of his better movies as far as I’m concerned.

THE DEEP HOUSE (2021)

Directed by the Inside duo of Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who also crafted the screenplay with Julien David and Rachel Parker, The Deep House has a really intriguing concept at its core: it’s about a pair of divers exploring a haunted house that sits at the bottom of a lake. It used to be on dry ground, of course, but the valley it’s in was artificially submerged tom combat flooding in the surrounding area. So The Deep House is a movie about an underwater haunted house, which is a very appealing and clever idea. I just wish the execution of that idea had been more entertaining to watch.

As it is, I would say the most interesting thing about The Deep House is the story of how it was made. Bustillo and Maury came up with the idea because they have a shared love of "the aquatic universe and haunted house films", but combining the two made the shoot quite complicated. The house was built on large grids and lowered into a 9 meter deep water tank that was 20 meters wide. While the cast and crew were filming in the sunken set, the directors had to stay on the surface, watching the action on monitors. It’s a shame all that trouble didn’t result in a more satisfying movie.

James Jagger and Camille Rowe star – and deliver fine performances – as Ben and Tina, a couple that travels around filming abandoned locations for their YouTube channel. When they hear there’s a perfectly preserved house sitting at the bottom of an artificial lake, they decide (well, Ben decides, mainly) to dive down into the house and film everything they see for YouTube. They enter the water with about an hour left of the movie’s 82 minute running time... and when they start exploring the house, it is creepy and unnerving. The movie began to lose me as it neared the end, when the threat inside the sunken house became more clear. And when Bustillo and Maury chose to end the story in a way that made me wonder why I had even bothered to sit through those 82 minutes. 

Inside made it clear that Bustillo and Maury are the sort of filmmakers that enjoy punishing both their characters and their audience, but the punishing turn The Deep House took made the overall viewing experience feel empty to me.

Although Bustillo, Maury, and Rowe are all French and The Deep House was filmed in Belgium, The Deep House is presented primarily in English. (Rowe is given some opportunity to speak French along the way.) Blumhouse – the company that has been one of the biggest names in the genre for over fifteen years now – picked it up for distribution, and sent it out into the world through a deal they had with the Epix network. (Now known as MGM+.)